


When All The Stars Are Dead

by signalbeam



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Asphyxiation, Asteroid Porn, Blood Drinking, Boundary Issues, Breathplay, Dubious Consent, F/F, Mortalityplay, Multiculturalism, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-27
Updated: 2012-03-27
Packaged: 2017-11-02 14:15:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/369890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the boundary of life, death, and immortality, there are certain negotiations that must be made. That's the theory, at least.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When All The Stars Are Dead

You are certain that Rose knows that you know that she is watching you at night. You’re certain you know this because this is the sixth night in a row that she has watched you climb into your recupracoon and then stay in her pile of scalemates and watch your recupracoon with a book in her lap. She is going to stay there for hours and read and read and read, that is all she does, all night. Your skin itches in the slime and your mouth is full of a warmth that sinks deep into the very root of your teeth. It’s a cross between hunger and anger and burns all through the long seconds of Rose refusing to go to sleep. There is work to be done. You must find that clown, you must get the bodies back you must do something to go through time until your chance arrives, you must. Doesn’t she know, you think, that she is wasting her time, that she is agitating you—this is something a moirail would do, and you have no moirail. The closest thing you have to one is a girl floating in a jar, or worse, rotting in some dank, underground corner of this flying rock. 

Yes, you have many, many things to occupy you at night. In a battle of who can outlast the other, you think it’s likely that you can outlast Rose Lalonde. But it’s still a thing of question. 

Two or three hours after you have retired, you hear her pad up to your coon. You can smell her scalp from here. Heavier and even a little sweet against the floral perfume that winds through her pale hair. She is bending her head into your coon. You hear her fingernails dig into the lacquered exterior, hear the little scrape of cloth catching against the rougher bumps of the coon. Her breath smells like coffee. Yours would probably smell like blood. It’s something of a moot point for you now. 

She touches the tip of your ear, and then lets her fingers move some stray hairs. The warmth burns. Her gesture screams pale to you; you want to turn your head and sink your fangs into her wrist. And then she withdraws her hand. You can picture what shape her bent arm and bony wrist form in the darkness, a ladle, maybe, as though she is scooping the sopor from the pod. And then you hear her turn. She leaves you, heel-toe, and settles into her pile of scalemates. You try to listen for the sounds of her falling asleep—you doze, and wake a few minutes later with a jerk. The liquid sloshes around your coon, and your foot slips on the soft, interior flesh in your scramble. Your hand slams against the wall for stability. 

“Kanaya?” Rose says from her pile. She doesn’t sound anywhere close to sleep. For a moment all you hear is that long, blank quiet of both of you listening for clues as to what the other is doing; it’s another moment until you realize that it’s not silence on your end, but a predatory anticipation. There’s something growing inside you, cold and nerveless and dangerous. “Are you awake? That was a rhetorical question. When you’re asleep, you become dimmer.” 

“I find it disturbing,” you say, “that you have been watching me long enough to know this.”

“Well.” And you hear some scalemates falling from the top of the pile and landing with a squeak on the ground. “It’s been almost two years. I’m sure you can tell when I’m pretending.” 

“Yes,” you say. When she sleeps, she becomes less appetizing and not more. You like it best when she’s flush with triumph, when she’s bordering on the line between exhaustion and exhilaration. It makes you picture your nose on her neck, your tongue pressed flat against the ridges of her throat, you on top of her, her hands around your neck asking you to both stop and to go, go. “You drool.” 

“I do not.”

“And,” you say, pushing your chest out of the slime and turning so you can see out the entrance of the coon, “sometimes you cry.” 

Rose is halfway to you. Her smile, wry and amused, becomes taut and wan in your faint light. She folds her arms. “Not too often, I hope.”

“I wouldn’t know,” you say, only a little apologetic. 

You keep a number of towels both on the floor and draped over the top of your coon. You reach for a smaller towel draped on the edge of the entrance and wipe the slime off of your shoulders and chest. She’s seen you naked before. In recent weeks you’ve started having sex, nervous and restless movements against each other. Sometimes blood isn’t even on your mind, just a fire in your spine and a molten, waxy feeling in the stillness of your chest. You haven’t touched her since she’s begun her watch; there is a too large part of you that wants to suck the pulse right out of her. You like the image of it, like it more than it scares you: the entirety of her life, smeared across your teeth and heavy in your stomach. 

“I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to sleep in that,” Rose says. “They have theories, you know, about returning to the womb and how certain ways of sleeping will stimulate an in-utero effect. It promotes restfulness.”

“ _Wombs_ ,” you say, and laugh. “Dogs come from wombs.”

“You’re lucky that you’re a pretty alien girl from another universe, or I’d be insulted.”

“I’m very charming,” you say, rising out of the slime. You rest on the entrance as you wipe yourself clean. The towel has little wizards on it, and is purple, coarse, and not very absorbent. It’s one of Rose’s creations. She looks away, and you pause; you don’t reach for your clothes, and instead pick up a towel to try to do something about your sopor-gelled hair. You want, more than anything else right now, shampoo.

“Ah,” Rose says. “Well.” You peer at her. She meets your gaze with the corners of her eyes, smiles a little, and then looks away. 

“Should I put something on?” you say, holding the towel. “Because you seem uncomfortable.” 

“Discomfiture with unnecessary nudity? On my part? Never,” she says. And then: “Aren’t you cold?” 

“I’m planning on going back into the recupracoon, so I’d rather not coat the inside of my clothes with slime,” you say. “If you are uncomfortable, then maybe you should question which quadrant you would like me in.”

Her hand grips the orange sleeves of her robe. Her smile has long vanished, shrunk down to a lifeless, plain line. “You know I don’t think about quadrants. We’ve been over this before.”

“I remember.” Human love and human pity versus red pity and pale pity. You found it kind of stupid. “But I can feel you corralling me into the pale quadrant like I am some kind of herdless bleatbeast and I am not pale for you, not even a little, but even without believing in the quadrants, I can feel you flipping through them and it’s making me—” _hungry_ , you mean to say. But you hope she hears _confused_. 

“Pityfucks are a thing on Earth, too.” 

“Yes, a pity that those ‘pityfucks’ on Earth are entirely degrading,” you say. “Even more sad than the so-called pail-rails.” 

“I’m not your moirail,” she says. She steps to you, and the shape of her jaw emerges in your light as a pale, soft line. “What are you accusing me of, exactly? Caring for you? Being concerned that you never sleep?” 

“Yes, the undead creatures of the day require so much rest.” 

“You never sleep and you wander around the asteroid for hours,” she says. “I’m concerned for you. That doesn’t mean that I want to masturbate to you writhing beneath my papping hand.” Your spine nearly snaps itself in sheer disgust. She steps to you again, hand extended; you grab her wrist and yank her closer. The wizard towel falls to the ground. She does her human growl at you, a frustrated noise that’s entirely in her mouth. You want to breathe in it, to feel it vibrate against your lips. “Let go.”

You hold on for a moment. You picture her again, writhing beneath you—when you think about it, it makes you a little sick, a queasy but delicious feeling. You’re supposed to imagine your kismesis like that, helpless and damaged under your teeth, not your matesprit. You’re a bad matesprit right now, you realize: a big, floppy slosh of dark emotion spilling into the red. Can you blame her for acting pale for you? You release her.

She stares at you, eyes half-lidded not with sleep, but with a forced casualness, like she’s pulled a curtain around herself. She rubs her thumb over the soft, quiet part of her wrist. 

“I’m sorry,” you say. 

“For what, pray tell?” she says. “Your untoward aggression? Your sad, pathetic aggravation over something you have no hope of changing? Your misdirected anger? I feel as though I’m beginning to understand the whole concept of pity as romance.”

“Do you,” you say, and belatedly realize she’s being sarcastic. 

“I do,” she says, and sounds sincere. You have no idea what is going on. She lowers her head, and removes her cowl. The hair on the back of her neck sticks up, slightly. “I now see that my quietly concerned approach caused both of us some confusion. Had I known that you’d conclude that my interests in you have shifted quadrants—an alien concept to me, I’m sure you know—then I would have communicated my point by allowing you to run futilely on the treadmill of dead-end destinies.” 

“We can’t all be seers,” you say. You reach for a towel to cover yourself. 

She puts a hand on your forearm before you can pick the towel up, and says, “Come over here,” and you do. She kisses you, tongueless and softly. Her lips are just a bit rough at the middle of the upper lip, and the dried skin drags over your much better cared for lips. You open your mouth, run your tongue along her lower lip; you’re prepared to bring your fangs into this, if you have to. She pulls away and says, “Let’s go to bed together.” 

“You might drown,” you say. 

“I don’t think ‘death by sopor slime’ counts as just or heroic. In any case, we’ve never done this before. In the interests of staking my claim in your flushed quadrant, I think it’s high time that we accelerate up the echeladder of relationshipping, so to speak.” 

“Ah,” you say. “You should be careful. You know what happened in the story of the hopbeast and the shellcrawler.”

“Slow and steady wins the race?” 

“No, the shellcrawler laid an ambush for the hopbeast and ate it. Your human stories are strange.” 

You bend down to open the drain valve. The slime exits slow and thickly, the color edging a grimy yellow-ish with age and at least a week and a half of use—you were due to change it, anyway. Rose, unexpectedly, puts a hand between your shoulder blades. 

“I’m very angry with you,” she says, but her voice is tight with not hate, but controlled melancholy, as though her resentment of your wretched anger has become resigned to becoming plainer disappointment instead. The rough bit of her upper lip scratches against the back of your neck; her hair brushes against your skin, and your claws dig into your palms. She frames her kisses with her hands, and goes from the base of your neck down to your scar. She stops at the depressed mass of tissue on your back. Her other hand reaches around, and strokes the front of the scar. When this fails to elicit the reaction she’s looking for, she scratches it instead, hard enough to hurt. You hiss, the arousal draining into a dull throb of frustration. 

“You never told me how you died,” she says. 

“I don’t think,” you say, “it matters.” 

She huffs, a little, and then stands. You do the same. She keeps her hand on you; it travels up, spreads out against your chest, rubs against your skin in steady circles. When your knees are straight, she raises up on her toes and catches your mouth again. She’s searching for analogues to those raised nerve bundles on her breasts; it takes her a moment to remember. 

Her teeth brush against your lower lip, hot and warm and strangely flat. You run your tongue on the edge of her teeth, and let your tongue spill over. Her lower lip catches on yours as she moans into your mouth. Her hands clench against your sides, and you grip the collar of her robes. You can almost hear the blood rushing through her human veins and arteries. If she notices the way your kiss slows, she doesn’t comment on it. 

“We should remove this from your person,” you say. It’ll only be a coincidence if that garish garment were to be ruined in your haste, you figure. 

“Maybe,” she says, half coy and half steely. “Let’s go in.” 

You climb in, backwards. The slime’s shallower than you’d like. It barely covers the top of your knees when you straighten out your legs. Rose takes the time to take off her shoes before climbing in with you. She kisses you again, or tries. She sinks into the coon’s flesh, and falls on top of you. For a moment, her whole body is pressed against you. You can feel her blood pusher, alive and fast, against your dead one. When you suck in a long breath of air, she shivers on top of you. She works on removing her leggings. When you exhale, you see the purple in her eyes shrink to a little band of color around a much larger dark disc. She tosses her leggings out of the recupracoon. She raises her arms, and you lift her tunic off of her. Her skin prickles with something she calls _goosebumps_. A human physiological response to cold. She won’t say so, but you can sense it, in the way that she clenches her teeth to disguise a shiver. You reach up and around to the control panel, and dial up the heat. Then you fit your mouth on the raised ridge of her throat, and think about what you could do with it—she gets impatient with you, and grabs your hand to one of her cloth-covered human breast. You let your nails run across the nipple, and her hips roll, buck into the harder bone protecting your bulge. You lick her throat, wrap your tongue around the curve of her neck until you find her pulse, fast-beating and rapid. The picture of her writhing beneath you comes back. A little part of you wants to resist it, but then she says, “Oh my god,” and you want it, you want it and you think she’ll give it to you, if you press hard enough. 

She removes her bra and tosses it out of the coon while you’re busy imagining her with your bites, all the way down the yielding line of her body. She cradles the back of your head in her palm and then pushes your mouth down to her breast. Her heart is a two-beat machine, smaller and less powerful than you first thought, but still, you press the flat front of your teeth across her sternum and think about cracking it with your jaws, licking the blood that will pool in her chest. 

“Kanaya,” she mutters, and pushes your head to the left. You swirl your tongue around the brown skin surrounding her nipple, not actually touching the bump until her legs go tight around your hips and the hand on your horn becomes demanding. You hear nothing but the noise of her body at work—the noise of _you_ at work, the percussion of her heart against the faint creak of bone and the softer squelch of her organs. And then there’s the smell of her, going from faint and pleasant to harsh and nearly heavy. Her breath exits in quick, shallow puffs. When your hand finds the inside of her thigh, she says, almost entirely involuntarily, “Ah!” and pulls at your horn so hard that pain crackles down from your skull. Half of it ends up echoing in the dark scar on your stomach, and the other half mingles with the initial sting of your bulge breaking away from the bone sheath and sliding out of your body. She notices it, and shifts down so she can brush her fingers not against your bulge, but the nook. It’s still mostly dry. You tilt your hips up, but she dips her finger in the slime and rubs the fluid against your nook. The pleasure smashes through you, so hot that you almost lift Rose out of the slime. You’ve never had sex with Rose before in here; the idea of sleeping in a slush of your genetic material and slime had always seemed unappealing. You’re beginning to change your mind. 

“I have no idea if this is toxic or not,” she says, low and hot against your neck. “For your sake, I hope it’s not.” 

“It’s only—in combination,” you say. “When you heat it past a certain and when certain chemicals—like the pies, the slime itself—” The thought of those pies makes you hungry, though of a different sort. She looks down at you, a little surprised, then plunges her fingers into the slime again and swipes her fingers against your nook. At the bottom edge, she pushes up, and you grind down against her, even when her fingers brush against bone. There’s no ‘in’ for trolls, just a long line of nerves and sensitive tissue. She says it makes sense, given that trolls practice external fertilization. Still, you can tell she sometimes expects things to be more analogous than they are. 

You pity her sometimes, for her forgetfulness. Not so much now, when she’s coating your entire nook with slime and your bulge is curling away from your body and a familiar buzzing feeling in your throat. You reach for her throat, and she offers it to you. She yelps in surprise when, instead of licking it, you fit your lips against it and suck at it, hard. She pulls it back into her body, then lets it back out. Encouraged, you nip at it, then fit your teeth on either side of the column. Her breath hitches, and her hand slows against your nook. You twist and rub her nipples, in an attempt to encourage her. She tries to pull her neck away, but no, she _offered_ , there are no take backs now. You let her slip away just enough so that the points of your fangs are touching not the harder cartilage of her upper throat, but the much softer, more desirable part, near the base of her neck. You could bite straight through it, if you wanted to, and god, you nearly want to. She’d survive it, you know, after the initial death, but your bulge is a sad, painful monument to how much you need her to keep fucking you. You release her throat, and she breathes in sharp and hard through the nose. You lick along her artery to comfort her. When this doesn’t work, you stroke her back as she takes three stuttering breaths. 

Her fear irritates you a little. It’s not as though you would have actually bitten, only that you wanted to. You wanted to, very badly. 

She lets go of your horn to readjust her body. You spread your legs a little wider so she can fit more comfortably between them. She removes her underwear, and then the pads of her fingers graze your bulge before coming up to her throat. Her expression is one part perplexed, one part injured. She keeps one hand still in your nook, but she doesn’t move them. Then she touches your own throat, her touch light until she reaches the part of where even your cartilage becomes soft and weak. She pushes her thumb into it. You don’t breathe, but you still feel an instinctive chill cut through you.

“Do you want to go on,” she says, and presses down harder. 

You try to swallow. You wrap your fingers around her wrist. Her smile is grim and lightless, but she takes pity on you—you feel another wash of pity pass through you, and your bulge twists towards her hand in your nook. She strokes the ridges of your throat, and kisses you, gently. Then her sopor covered hand wraps tight around your bulge and another equally slick hand fits into your nook. She’s rough with you; her blunt teeth on your cheek, on your jaw, then scraping along your still neck. Her fingernails catching along the soft slickness of your nook, her hot palm on your bulge. You twist against her, eager for more. Your mouth is watering. You’re close, and you don’t even have a bucket and you’re not even sure if you’ll have time to reach for one—

When she bites you, right under the jaw and almost at the throat, you come, the pleasure scattering against the panic. You can feel the first batch of genetic material pushing through your eggsack and into your mouth, and you _need_ that bucket, you don’t want to fuck Rose while your own eggs float in the slime. You lurch out of the coon and expel the eggs on a towel. For a while you retch wetly over the edge of your coon, muscles tightening and clenching. 

She waits until your tongue is no longer lolling out of your mouth. Then she grips your bulge again. “Does the slime act as a kind of aphrodisiac for you?” she asks. 

“A little,” you say. “I’ve always read about it in books, but those things are full of dubious advice.” The books have recommended felatting horns and rubbing your bulge with exotic spices for the benefit of your kismesis. The books can be incredibly stupid. 

“Fascinating.” You know her well enough to understand that she has just told you to shut up. Her legs are coated nearly up to the thigh with warm slime. You grip the back of her thighs, and slide your hands to her ass and knead it. Her eyelids lower. You kiss her collarbone with an open mouth. She responds by tightening her grip on your bulge until it’s almost painful. You move one hand around, run your hand over the coarse hair surrounding her nook, then slip your fingers in. “Christ, Kanaya,” she whispers, and shuts her eyes. 

She’s wet already, and even wetter at the strange place that leads _into_ her body. Sometimes you’re afraid of injuring her, but this is apparently what humans do for sex. You find it simultaneously marvelous and nauseatingly worrying. Her hand on your bulge loosens when your fingers slide in, and then up. She thinks to coat her hand with more slime before wrapping your bulge around her fingers and jerking you off some more; you feel the pleasure so acutely that your legs tremble. You adjust your hand, twisting your thumb up, and rub at the vestigial nub. Her teeth grind together when you add a third finger, and then, when you find a ridged spot inside of her, she moans, and tries to stifle it. She ends up panting and whimpering into your ear, and looking annoyed with herself, even as she drops her head to your shoulder. 

You’re nearly ready to declare yourself the winner when she forces herself a little more upright, bends over you and kisses your forehead, the ridge of your brow, half on your nose and half on your cheek. She finds your mouth—her teeth chatter when your spare hand scratches the inside of her thigh as you twist your fingers into her. She sucks, a little, on your upper lip, then lifts herself off of your fingers. When you try to follow, she releases her grip on your bulge, and steers your hand to her waist. She’s repositioning herself, too—with a jerk, you realize that she’s about to put your bulge inside of her. You’ve wondered about this—of course you have—but it’s always frightened you, to imagine what it’d be like. Maybe at the end of her strange, apparently endlessly long human nook, is something that will twist your bulge clean off—the tip of your bulge slides against her folds, and you’d take that risk, you would. 

“Ah, yes,” she says, and through the dark lust in her eyes, you can see, for fuck’s sake, a smugness. “I knew you would like this.”

“Rose,” you say, meaning to make it sound like a warning. 

She grinds down on you, and strokes your bangs from your face. “Ssh,” she says. You curl your fingers into her waist. She uses your shoulders to steady herself as she descends. This time the heat is so intense that you feel nearly ready to hurl another batch of eggs. Your hips jerk into her, and she winces. 

“Wait,” she says. “Let me.” 

“Are you sure,” you ask. 

“Very,” she says, and jokingly puts her thumb against your throat. But she doesn’t remove it. She raises herself up a little again, and then down. She hasn’t taken even half of your bulge in her—a good thing, because then you think you would have pailed inside of her, and nothing could be more embarrassing—and sets up a quick, shallow rhythm that makes her eyes flutter close and you desperately, desperately impatient. You claw into the soft flesh of the coon, and remember that she will likely find a way to choke you to death if you thrust. 

She seems to take pity on you, and on this descent, takes half of you in. You’re almost a little scared to imagine her taking your whole bulge; it’s almost a relief to see that it’s a little painful for her. Almost, because you don’t want her to stop. She slips lower and lower and then says, “Okay, now you may,” and you plunge in, holding onto her with both arms. She kisses your mouth fiercely, you think, in part to muffle her shock and grunt. She rocks you in and out of her, never releasing your bulge entirely. 

“I’d like to make you come inside of me,” Rose says, framing your face with her forearms. Her hands are wrapped around your horns. When you let your bulge spiral inside of her, she grabs onto your horns so hard that you think she’s going to snap one. “But having observed and experienced the force of troll ejaculation, I’d rather not.” 

“I see that you’re doing your best to try to make me,” you say. And then, blatantly lying, you say, “A pity your best isn’t enough.” 

“What would I have to do to make you?” she says, and her eyes burn as they stare into you. She stops, pants, and then twists her hips with you nearly all the way in. “Would I have to cut my throat? Let you bite through my vocal cords? Would I have to,” and her eyes flutter shut as you run the back of your nails over her nipples, “let you kill me?” 

Her spine flexes, and suddenly it’s like you’re drowning in heat. She smiles a little, and then kisses your lips. Her hair is flat with sweat and a bit of slime; you cup her face in your hands, and then lower your face to her neck. She comes down on you two, three times, hard, and then clenches around you. You sink your fangs into her neck at the same time, and she cries out, a familiar choked up sound that lets you know she’s lost. The surge of blood on your tongue is sweet with adrenaline. Her nook squeezes around you again, and your bulge is wet and slick and fuck, you have to get out—you pull out of her nook and neck, and come, hard. 

Her neck is still bleeding when you wind back down. Rose has moved out of your lap and is now resting beside you. The first thing you are cogent of is that you have genetic material all over your own lap. The second is that Rose is watching you in a way that’s not pity or love or even hate. You’re not sure _what_ it is. It's the look she gives Dave sometimes, when she wants something from him but doesn't want to hurt him. 

“I wonder if it’s safe for me to sleep in here,” she says. “Nothing has started to itch yet.”

“You should get out,” you say, and she tenses, as though anticipating pain. “I need to clean,” you explain. 

She steps out first, carefully. You want her to stop so you can examine her nook, see if it is injured or hurt, but exhaustion is quickly setting in for you. You follow her. You grab two towels, one for you and one for her. She’s sloppy with the drying. You try to do a more thorough job with yourself before you bend down and open the drain again. 

While you’re waiting for the old slime to swirl away, you throw out the eggs, toss the used towels in the laundry bin, and lay out a towel for Rose to stand on so she won’t drip on the floor. Normally you’d flush out the coon, but you’re too tired to even think of doing that. You shut the drain, fill the coon with a new batch of warm sopor. 

“You got a considerable amount of egg in my shoe,” she says. 

“You have never tried cleaning eggs out of a slime drain, so.” You haven’t, either, but you think it’d be awful. You step back into the coon after it’s half-full. Rose is watching you, arms folded across her breasts. “Are you going to come in?” you ask. 

“I did say we should.” 

“You’re still bleeding.” 

“How astute of you.” You sigh in frustration. She steps to you, and puts a hand on the entrance of the coon. Then she steps in, too, sitting at the entrance. You catch a glimpse of her nook, and lick your lips. She lets her towel drop to the ground. You want to fold it somewhere, but she settles against you, and you suddenly don’t feel much like moving. 

“My mother once nearly drowned in a hot tub,” Rose says idly as the slime continues to fill the coon. “I didn’t see it, but she mentioned it over dinner a few weeks later.” This is something she does, when she’s preparing herself to say something emotional: bring up a seemingly unrelated anecdote about her mother. You normally find it a little confusing. This isn’t an exception. “I loved her very much.”

“I know you do,” you say. You’re dismayed to find that your voice is thick with pity.

“I love you, too, you know.” She’s speaking mostly to the wall. You do your best to stay still and look calm. “Concern is a normal part of human love. You spent six hours hemming a single pair of pants yesterday, and I don’t know how to make you feel better. Should I play matchmaker? Ask Terezi if she would like to be your kismesis or moirail. Offer up my brother as a slave for your sexual pleasures?” Her hand, unconsciously, seeks her neck. “I know it is hard for you,” she says. “Without the matriorb and your duty. But still, I feel… I would like to…” You lick her neck and suck, lightly, at the wound. She grips your horn, and fits her thumb against your throat again. 

You hum against her hand. It disturbs you that you can. It seems to bother her, too, because she tries to withdraw. You force her hand to stay where it is. “I should be dead by now,” you say. It’s wheezy and weak, even though your head feels none of the effects. You’re embarrassed by the noise. 

“We all should be,” she says. Her sadness stretches out enormously before you. You feel sorry for her. You think you’ve tricked her, somehow, into believing you’re someone like her, a person who knows her purpose and has the means to accomplish it. Now you help her compile her books, you wander a lonely rock with your chainsaw, you wait for duty to summon you again. 

She’s pushing her thumbs into your throat now, both of them, without your prompting. Your head sinks below the slime—you realize, with a sinking horror, how difficult your hair will be to wash tomorrow morning. Little bits of words reach your ears, distant and muffled. If you breathed right now, you wouldn’t drown, you’d just get a little heavier and, maybe, need someone to help you drain your lungs. You’d laugh, if not for the sheer unpleasantness that is having someone inexpertly jam a needle through your ribs. You shake her hands off of you and rise out. Her hands find your head, lifting you up. She kisses you as though she has rescued you from certain death, as though you are two soldiers thrown overboard in space and, by miraculous intervention, have found each other again on some god forsaken planet on the edge of another universe. 

She parts from you to spit the slime out of her mouth, then rests beside you. Her head rests against your shoulder. She adjusts the angle of her body so her arm falls across your chest. A single leg crosses over the top of yours. You rub the bend in her collar bone, and then let your hand drift lower. Between her breasts is not a scar, but a shadow. She was stabbed here in a different body in a fight she lost nearly a sweep ago. You wonder if it hurts her. You’re sorry for her either way. She doesn’t flinch when you touch it, but she shivers when you find the place where you bit her earlier in the dark, long, almost-lonely night, and ease your fangs gently in.


End file.
